Excerpts

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“Instead Of Packing Him Off To Jail, They Send Him In For Brain Surgery”

December 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The future usually arrives wearing the clothes of the past, but occasionally we truly and seriously experience the shock of the new. On that topic: The 1965 Life magazine piece “Will Man Direct His Own Evolution?” is a fun but extremely overwrought essay by Albert Rosenfeld about the nature of identity in a time when humans would be made by design, comprised of temporary parts. Like a lot of things written in the ’60s about science and society, it’s informed by an undercurrent of anxiety about the changes beginning to affect the nuclear family. An excerpt:

Even you and I–in 1965, already here and beyond the reach of potential modification–could live to face curious and unfamiliar problems in identity as a result of man’s increasing ability to control his own mortality after birth. As organ transplants and artificial body parts become even more available it is not totally absurd to envision any one of us walking around one day with, say, a plastic cornea, a few metal bones and Dacron arteries, with donated glands, kidney and liver from some other person, from an animal, from an organ bank, or even an assembly line, with an artificial heart, and computerized electronic devices to substitute for muscular, neural or metabolic functions that may have gone wrong. It has been suggested–though it will almost certainly not happen in our lifetime–that brains, too, might be replaceable, either by a brain transplanted from someone else, by a new one grown in tissue culture, or an electronic or mechanical one of some sort. ‘What,’ asks Dr. Lederberg, “is the moral, legal or psychiatric identity of an artificial chimera?”

Dr. Seymour Kety, an outstanding psychiatric authority now with the National Institute of Health, points out that fairly radical personality changes already have been wrought by existing techniques like brainwashing, electroshock therapy and prefrontal lobotomy, without raising serious questions of identity. But would it be the same if alien parts and substances were substituted for the person’s own, resulting in a new biochemistry and a new personality with new tastes, new talents, new political views–-perhaps even a different memory of different experiences? Might such a man’s wife decide she no longer recognized him as her husband and that he was, in fact, not? Or might he decide that his old home, job and family situation were not to his liking and feel free to chuck the whole setup that have been quite congenial to the old person?

Not that acute problems of identity need await the day when wholesale replacement of vital organs is a reality. Very small changes in the brain could result in astounding metamorphoses. Scientists who specialize in the electrical probing of the human brain have, in the past few years, been exploring a small segment of the brain’s limbic system called the amygdala–and discovering that it is the seat of many of our basic passions and drives, including the drives that lead to uncontrollable sexual extremes such as satyriasis and nymphomania. 

Suppose, at a time that may be surprisingly near at hand, the police were to trap Mr. X, a vicious rapist whose crimes had terrorized the women of a neighborhood for months. Instead of packing him off to jail, they send him in for brain surgery. The surgeon delicately readjusts the distorted amygdala, and the patient turns into a gentle soul with a sweet, loving disposition. He is clearly a stranger to the man who was wheeled into the operating room. Is he the same man, really? Is he responsible for the crimes that he–or that other person–committed? Can he be punished? Should he go free?

As time goes on, it may be necessary to declare, without the occurrence of death, that Mr. X has ceased to exist and that Mr. Y has begun to be. This would be a metaphorical kind of death and rebirth, but quite real psychologically–and thus, perhaps, legally.•

“Getting Music For Free Meant Taping A Penny To A Paper Card And Mailing It Off For 12 Free Records”

December 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Like much of the pre-Internet recording-industry infrastructure, the Columbia House Music Club, an erstwhile popular method of bulk-purchasing songs through snail mail, no longer exists, having departed this world before iTunes’ unfeeling gaze, as blank and pitiless as the sun. Your penny or paper dollar will no longer secure you a dozen records or tapes, nor do you have to experience the buyer’s remorse of one who reflexively purchases media without heeding the fine print which reveals that the relationship, as the Carpenters would say, had only just begun.

Of course, music pilfering didn’t start in our digital times with Napster, and Columbia was a prime target for those who loved systems capable of gaming. Via the excellent Longreads, here’s the opening of “The Rise and Fall of the Columbia House Record Club — and How We Learned to Steal Music,” a 2011 Phoenix article by Daniel Brockman and Jason W. Smith:

On June 29, 2011, the last remnant of what was once Columbia House — the mightiest mail-order record club company that ever existed — quietly shuttered for good. Other defunct facets of the 20th-century music business have been properly eulogized, but it seems that nary a tear was shed for the record club. Perhaps no one noticed its demise. After all, by the end, Columbia House was no longer Columbia House; it had folded into its main competitor and become an online-only entity years before.

A more likely explanation, though, is that a new generation of music fans who had never known a world without the Internet couldn’t grasp the marvel that was the record club in its heyday. From roughly 1955 until 2000, getting music for free meant taping a penny to a paper card and mailing it off for 12 free records — along with membership and the promise of future purchasing.

The allure of the record club was simple: you put almost nothing down, signed a simple piece of paper, picked out some records, and voila! — a stack of vinyl arrived at your doorstep. By 1963, Columbia House was the flagship of the record-club armada, with 24 million records shipped. By 1994, they had shipped more than a billion records, accounted for 15 percent of all CD sales, and had become a $500-million-a-year behemoth that employed thousands at its Terre Haute, Indiana, manufacturing and shipping facility.

Of course, most of the record clubs’ two million customers failed to read the fine print, obligating them to purchase a certain number of monthly selections at exorbitant prices and even more exorbitant shipping costs. At the same time, consumers plotted to sign up multiple accounts under assumed names, in order to keep getting those 12-for-a-penny deals as often as possible. Record clubs may have introduced several generations of America’s youth to the concept of collection agencies — and the concept of stealing music, decades before the advent of the Internet.•

 

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“Not Many Americans Outside The Zip Codes In Question Think Of SoCal As A Real Place To Begin With”

December 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Even though I love the hysterical contempt of Nathanael West above almost all other things, I can equally enjoy Tom Carson’s wonderfully worded Paul Thomas Anderson consideration at Grantland, which makes quick work of The Day of the Locust characterizations of Californians in the service of exalting the great filmmaker as a Wellesian master of the region. There are gorgeous, knowing passages like this one: “[There Will Be Blood] is the unofficial prequel to Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, almost the only other movie to remind us that Southern California was a paradise won, not lost, by capitalism’s version of original sin — the destruction of the natural order. The same is true of America itself, of course, but California’s role in our culture is to incarnate the New World’s own, hyperbolized promised land.” The opening: 

Is it going too far to say that Southern California is to Paul Thomas Anderson what North Mississippi was to William Faulkner? Possibly. So maybe we’re better off playing it safe and going with Flannery O’Connor’s home turf instead.

Not to worry, people. As novelistic as PTA can be, which is plenty, this isn’t about giving him some kind of misbegotten upgrade by proclaiming his movies are Just Like Literature. The point is that he’s a regional artist in a way that doesn’t have many screen equivalents. If East Coast critics often overlook this in spite of loving him to death, no wonder: Not many Americans outside the zip codes in question think of SoCal as a real place to begin with.

Neither do most of the transplants, for that matter. Reality wasn’t the attraction when they moved, after all; liberation was. One of Anderson’s great strengths is that his understanding of Los Angeles as a teeming vat of self-actualization projects doesn’t make him feel obliged to depict the volunteer lab rats as bizarre or foolish, in the hysterically contemptuous way that we’ve been used to since The Day of the Locust. Good old American transcendentalism just got all modern and DIY in SoCal, and the results are a travesty only if you mistake different methods for changed goals.

Being the local boy that most of his fellow filmmakers aren’t — he was born in Studio City, pretty much the definition of deglamorized glamour — has the effect of turning everybody else’s Oz into Anderson’s evocatively vivid Kansas.•

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“TNR Might Have Been Helped By Having More—Or Merely Any—Black People On Its Staff”

December 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

The reason why white people, no matter how noble, can’t speak for people of other races is that human experiences vary based on color, class, gender and other categorizations. It’s just a fact. So while all manner of well-heeled New York and Beltway journalists (almost all white) decried what’s happened recently at the New Republic–and there’s certainly been something important lost in the tumult–Ta-Nehesi Coates of the Atlantic saw things somewhat differently. He recognized a publication staffed almost exclusively by caucasians which has been horribly racist toward African-Americans, pointing fingers at them and blaming them, especially during the often-odious Marty Peretz reign, marred as it was by bigotry and warmongering. And while many scoffed that the venerable periodical might now become Buzzfeed or Gawker, Coates points out that such online publications are more enlightened about race than TNR has been. An excerpt:

“TNR made a habit of ‘reflecting briefly’ on matters that were life and death to black people but were mostly abstract thought experiments to the magazine’s editors. Before, during, and after Sullivan’s tenure, the magazine seemed to believe that the kind of racism that mattered most was best evidenced in the evils of Afrocentrism, the excesses of multiculturalism, and the machinations of Jesse Jackson. It’s true that TNR’s staff roundly objected to excerpting The Bell Curve, but I was never quite sure why. Sullivan was simply exposing the dark premise that lay beneath much of the magazine’s coverage of America’s ancient dilemma.

What else to make of the article that made Stephen Glass’s career possible, ‘Taxi Cabs and the Meaning of Work’? The piece asserted that black people in D.C. were distinctly lacking in the work ethic best evidenced by immigrant cab drivers. A surrealist comedy, Glass’s piece revels in the alleged exploits of a mythical Asian-American avenger—Kae Bang—who wreaks havoc on black criminals who’d rather rob taxi drivers than work. The article concludes with Glass, in the cab, while its driver is robbed by a black man. It was all lies.

What else to make of TNR sending Ruth Shalit to evaluate affirmative action atThe Washington Post in 1995? ‘She cast Post writer Kevin Merida as some kind of poster boy for affirmative action when in fact he had risen in the business for reasons far more legitimate than her own,’ David Carr wrote in 1999. Shalit’s piece wasn’t all lies. But it wasn’t all true either. Shortly after the article was published, she was revealed to be a serial plagiarist.

TNR might have been helped by having more—or merely any—black people on its staff.”

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“I Predict Neither Extreme Will Be True”

December 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

That last 5% of perfecting autonomous vehicles may be more difficult than the first 95%, and driverless options will likely continue to be introduced incrementally rather than all at once, but if such a system is 100% realized, there will be all manner of ramifications. In a post on his blog, Google driverless sector consultant Brad Templeton looks at the possible outcomes in such a brave new world. An excerpt:

“When I talk about robocars, I often get quite opposite reactions:

  • Americans, in particular, will never give up car ownership! You can pry the bent steering wheel from my cold, dead hands.
  • I can’t see why anybody would own a car if there were fast robotaxi service!
  • Surely human drivers will be banned from the roads before too long.

I predict neither extreme will be true. I predict the market will offer all options to the public, and several options will be very popular. I am not even sure which will be the most popular.

  1. Many people will stick to buying and driving classic, manually driven cars. The newer versions of these cars will have fancy ADAS systems that make them much harder to crash, and their accident levels will be lower.
  2. Many will buy a robocar for their near-exclusive use. It will park near where it drops them off and always be ready. It will keep their stuff in the trunk.
  3. People who live and work in an area with robotaxi service will give up car ownership, and hire for all their needs, using a wide variety of vehicles.
  4. Some people will purchase a robocar mostly for their use, but will hire it out when they know they are not likely to use it, allowing them to own a better car. They will make rarer use of robotaxi services to cover specialty trips or those times when they hired it out and ended up needing it. Their stuff will stay in a special locker in the car.”

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“One Amazon Executive Referred To The Workers As Like ‘Robots In Human Form'”

December 9, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

An impediment to automation may be “robotic” humans willing to work for wages so low that it’s not cost efficient to replace them. From a peek inside a sprawling distribution center by Matt King of the Atlantic:

“Susan and her co-workers appeared in good spirits as the manager introduced them by name and told us how long they had been working at the company. About half of the workers had a mental or physical disability, a result of the company’s ‘inclusion’ program which mirrored similar efforts at other major retailers. In a news segment about a DC in South Carolina, one disabled worker said hers was ‘the coolest job in the world.’

These programs are viewed as leading examples of combined corporate and social success, but that success may be short-sighted. Pickers and low-skill jobs of the sort represent a pain point for DCs and the e-commerce executives who are managing their evolution. The jobs appear simple (one Amazon executive referred to the workers as like ‘robots in human form’), but the tasks are difficult to automate at scale: ‘Because products vary so much in size and shape and because of the way they sit on shelves, robotic manipulators still can’t beat real arms and hands,’ explains Erico Guizo on Spectrum, the blog for the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE).

Unlike Susan and her co-workers, who were salaried and long-time employees of the company, a growing number of ‘pickers’ at DCs across the country are hired through staffing agencies and classified as ‘non-permanent’ or ‘temporary.’ This means no health care coverage or benefits, pay that’s usually barely above the minimum wage, and employment that can be voided at a whim when the workers are no longer needed.

This tenuous labor arrangement is partly the result of an honest fluctuation in the demand for these jobs: The biggest influx of DC workers occurs just before the holiday season, when online retailers conduct a majority of their annual business. But like retail jobs, the arrangement is also an acknowledgement of the underlying economic reality: The jobs are utterly low-skill, and there exists a large supply of unemployed Americans willing to do the work.

‘In a way, because low-wage jobs are so cheap, we haven’t seen as much automation as you could,’ Joseph Foudy, a professor of economics at NYU’s Stern School of Business, told me.”

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“A Text Message Can Be Sent To Appropriate Sales Staff To Ensure They Provide Personal Attention”

December 9, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

We’ve been able to feed millions of images into social networks for “free,” armies of servers our seeming supplicants, but with facial-recognition software coming of age, the bill is nearly due. Will the surprising acceptance of surveillance online translate to the physical world? From Paul Rubens at the BBC:

“Imagine walking into a shop you’ve never been in before, to be greeted by name by a sales assistant you don’t know.

If you’re David Beckham or Lily Allen you may be used to this type of VIP treatment, but if your fame is more limited, or even non-existent then you might find this attention rather disconcerting.

Despite this, thanks to facial recognition software you don’t need to be a celebrity for sales assistants to know your name the moment you enter a shop.

That’s because companies such as Japanese technology giant NEC and FaceFirst, a California-based company, offer systems that use cameras placed at the entrances to shops to identify people as they come in.

If your face fits

When important existing or potential customers are spotted, a text message can be sent to appropriate sales staff to ensure they provide personal attention.

‘Someone could approach you and give you a cappuccino when you arrive, and then show you the things they think you will be interested in buying,’ says Joel Rosenkrantz, FaceFirst’s chief executive.

Before a system such as FaceFirst’s can be put into operation, it has to be loaded up with photos. So an obvious question to ask is where would they come from?”

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“Late In Lolita, One Of These Digressions Gives Away The Critical Inspiration”

December 9, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Videos | Permalink

If you put a gun to my head and asked what I thought was the best novel ever written in English, I would think you were crazy. Why are you pointing a gun at my head?!? Why not just ask me without the threat of murder?!? Do you want me to call the police?!?

After you were disarmed and arrested, I would think about the question again and just as likely choose Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov’s tale of monstrous love, as anything else. The language is impeccable, amazingly weighty and nimble all at once, and the book overall both profoundly funny and sad.

Art is one thing, however, but life another. The book’s main inspiration may have been von Lichberg or it may have been a very real horror, a 1940s NYC child abduction perpetrated by a felon in a fedora named Frank La Salle. (Or perhaps it was a combination of the two.) Via Longreads, a passage from “The Real Lolita,” an historical inquiry by Sarah Weinman published at the Penguin Random House blog:

Nabokov said he conjured up the germ of the novel—a cultured European gentleman’s pedophilic passion for a 12-year-old girl resulting in a madcap, satiric cross-country excursion—’late in 1939 or early in 1940, in Paris, at a time when I was laid up with a severe attack of intercostal neuralgia.’ At that point it was a short story set in Europe, written in his first language, Russian. Not pleased with the story, however, he destroyed it. By 1949, Nabokov had emigrated to America, the neuralgia raged anew, and the story shifted shape and nagged at him further, now as a longer tale, written in English, the cross-country excursion transplanted to America.

Lolita is a nested series of tricks. Humbert Humbert, the confessing pervert, tries so hard to obfuscate his monstrosities that he seems unaware when he truly gives himself away, despite alleging the treatise is a full accounting of his crimes. Nabokov, however, gives the reader a number of clues to the literary disconnect, the most important being the parenthetical. It works brilliantly early on in Lolita, when Humbert describes the death of his mother—’My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three’—or when he sights Dolores Haze in the company of her own mother, Charlotte, for the first time: ‘And, as if I were the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess (lost, kidnaped, discovered in gypsy rags through which her nakedness smiled at the king and his hounds), I recognized the tiny dark-brown mole on her side.’ The unbracketed narrative is what Humbert wants us to see; the asides reveal what is really inside his mind.

Late in Lolita, one of these digressions gives away the critical inspiration. Humbert, once more in Lolita’s hometown after five years away, sees Mrs. Chatfield, the “stout, short woman in pearl-gray,” in his hotel lobby, eager to pounce upon him with a “fake smile, all aglow with evil curiosity.” But before she can, the parenthetical appears like a pop-up thought balloon for the bewildered Humbert: “Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle [sic], a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?”•

_______________________________

“I think the book is shocking…I’m glad that it’s shocking.”


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“Do You Agree Or Disagree With The Decision Not To Indict?”

December 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ll use the graph below, from a post by Andrew Sullivan at the Dish, as possible proof of my contention that although police body-cameras may not instantly bring about a higher degree of justice, the images will effect public consciousness, which may in turn be brought to bear on race and policing.

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“How Far Off Is The Demon?”

December 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Andrew McAfee, co-author with Eric Brynjolfsson of The Second Machine Age, believes that Weak AI will destabilize employment for decades, but he doesn’t think species-threatening Artificial Intelligence is just around the bend. From his most recent Financial Times blog post:

“AI does appear to be taking off: after decades of achingly slow progress, computers have in the past few years demonstrated superhuman ability, from recognising street signs in pictures and diagnosing cancer to discerning human emotions and playing video games. So how far off is the demon?

In all probability, a long, long way away; so long, in fact, that the current alarmism is at best needless and at worst counterproductive. To see why this is, an analogy to biology is helpful.

It was clear for a long time that important characteristics of living things (everything from the colour of pea plant flowers to the speed of racehorses) was passed down from parents to their offspring, and that selective breeding could shape these characteristics. Biologists hypothesised that units labelled ‘genes’ were the agents of this inheritance, but no one knew what genes looked like or how they operated. This mystery was solved in 1953 when James Watson and Francis Crick published their paper describing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. This discovery shifted biology, giving scientists almost infinitely greater clarity about which questions to ask and which lines of inquiry to pursue.

The field of AI is at least one ‘Watson and Crick moment’ away from being able to create a full artificial mind (in other words, an entity that does everything our brain does). As the neuroscientist Gary Marcus explains: ‘We know that there must be some lawful relation between assemblies of neurons and the elements of thought, but we are currently at a loss to describe those laws.’ We also do not have any clear idea how a human child is able to know so much about the world — that is a cat, that is a chair — after being exposed to so few examples. We do not know exactly what common sense is, and it is fiendishly hard to reduce to a set of rules or logical statements. The list goes on and on, to the point that it feels like we are many Watson and Crick moments away from anything we need to worry about.”

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“Now China Is The World’s No. 1 Economic Power. Why Should We Care?”

December 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

China has quietly surpassed the U.S. this year as the world’s largest economic power, and that’s not a situation likely to reverse itself anytime soon, even if that nation should suffer a large-scale financial downturn. But what is the significance of America being number two? From Joseph Stiglitz at Vanity Fair:

Now China is the world’s No. 1 economic power. Why should we care? On one level, we actually shouldn’t. The world economy is not a zero-sum game, where China’s growth must necessarily come at the expense of ours. In fact, its growth is complementary to ours. If it grows faster, it will buy more of our goods, and we will prosper. There has always, to be sure, been a little hype in such claims—just ask workers who have lost their manufacturing jobs to China. But that reality has as much to do with our own economic policies at home as it does with the rise of some other country.

On another level, the emergence of China into the top spot matters a great deal, and we need to be aware of the implications.

First, as noted, America’s real strength lies in its soft power—the example it provides to others and the influence of its ideas, including ideas about economic and political life. The rise of China to No. 1 brings new prominence to that country’s political and economic model—and to its own forms of soft power. The rise of China also shines a harsh spotlight on the American model. That model has not been delivering for large portions of its own population. The typical American family is worse off than it was a quarter-century ago, adjusted for inflation; the proportion of people in poverty has increased. China, too, is marked by high levels of inequality, but its economy has been doing some good for most of its citizens. China moved some 500 million people out of poverty during the same period that saw America’s middle class enter a period of stagnation. An economic model that doesn’t serve a majority of its citizens is not going to provide a role model for others to emulate. America should see the rise of China as a wake-up call to put our own house in order.

Second, if we ponder the rise of China and then take actions based on the idea that the world economy is indeed a zero-sum game—and that we therefore need to boost our share and reduce China’s—we will erode our soft power even further. This would be exactly the wrong kind of wake-up call. If we see China’s gains as coming at our expense, we will strive for “containment,” taking steps designed to limit China’s influence. These actions will ultimately prove futile, but will nonetheless undermine confidence in the U.S. and its position of leadership. U.S. foreign policy has repeatedly fallen into this trap.•

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“The Planet As A Whole Is Fast Becoming Suburban”

December 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The whole world is a city, or becoming one, we’ve been told repeatedly, but a new Economist report pushes back at the idea, arguing that China, India and Brazil, three ascendant powers, are embracing the sprawl. Measures must be taken to ensure that the environmental costs of non-density are minimized. The opening:

“IN THE West, suburbs could hardly be less fashionable. Singers and film-makers lampoon them as the haunts of bored teenagers and desperate housewives. Ferguson, Missouri, torched by its residents following the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager, epitomises the failure of many American suburbs. Mayors like boasting about their downtown trams or metrosexual loft dwellers not their suburbs.

But the planet as a whole is fast becoming suburban. In the emerging world almost every metropolis is growing in size faster than in population. Having bought their Gucci handbags and Volkswagens, the new Asian middle class is buying living space, resulting in colossal sprawl. Many of the new suburbs are high-rise, though still car-oriented; others are straight clones of American suburbs (take a look at Orange County, outside Beijing). What should governments do about it?

The space race

Until a decade or two ago, the centres of many Western cities were emptying while their edges were spreading. This was not for the reasons normally cited. Neither the car nor the motorway caused suburban sprawl, although they sped it up: cities were spreading before either came along. Nor was the flight to the suburbs caused by racism. Whites fled inner-city neighbourhoods that were becoming black, but they also fled ones that were not. Planning and zoning rules encouraged sprawl, as did tax breaks for home ownership—but cities spread regardless of these. The real cause was mass affluence. As people grew richer, they demanded more privacy and space. Only a few could afford that in city centres; the rest moved out.

The same process is now occurring in the developing world, but much more quickly.”

“The Maze-Like Series Of Angled And Tapered Frames Create An Infinite Number Of Leaning Spots”

December 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The standing desk, a truly bad idea, is not likely to be the furniture of tomorrow’s office. The Dutch firm, RAAAF, has come up with an alternative proposal that’s even battier. It’s ergonomics run amok. From “The Weirdest Proposal Yet for the ‘Office of the Future,'” a Wired piece by Margaret Rhodes:

“The designers are especially interested in supported standing, which standing desks don’t offer. Supported standing, like upright leaning, can engage the muscles—hopefully enough to prevent the drop in fat-burning enzymes that occurs during long periods of sitting—without tiring out the employee’s legs and lower back quite so much. The maze-like series of angled and tapered frames create an infinite number of leaning spots, for workers of any height. There are no fixed desks, so employees might find it natural to roam around and be active.

That feature is also one of the obvious impracticalities of ‘The End of Sitting.’ Without desks, how do staffers keep track of supplies, notes, or work documents? Without offices or conference rooms, how can people have meetings that don’t disrupt everyone else’s concentration? ‘The End of Sitting’ is both an art installation and an experiment, so it’s not actually concerned with answering those questions. Instead, Rietveld says this is “about showing a different way of thinking.'”

______________________________

“Sitting kills”:

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“Lowe’s Innovation Labs Ask Published Science-Fiction Writers To Produce Stories Predicting Futuristic Scenarios For The Store”

December 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Kit Buchan at Guardian, a little more about the Lowe’s robotic shopping assistant, OSHbot, one realized idea from the chain store’s Innovation Labs, and one which won’t be replacing human workers, not yet at least:

“According to [Innovation Lab’s Executive Director Kyle] Nel, OSHbot is the product of an extraordinary innovation scheme in which Lowe’s Innovation Labs ask published science-fiction writers to produce stories predicting futuristic scenarios for the store. Lowe’s then seek out what Nel calls ‘uncommon partners’ to help make the stories reality; in OSHbot’s case, the trendy Silicon Valley learning hub Singularity University and the startup robotics firm Fellow Robots.

OSHbot is a 4ft-something, pear-shaped character; limbless, with nothing but a vague green glow for a face, and a screen slanted in front like a starched pinny. ‘It’s basically a roving kiosk; we definitely didn’t want it to have arms or anything like that,’ says Nel. ‘But there’s still lots to figure out, for instance: what voice should the robot have? Should it be male, should it be female? There are so many things we can’t know until we try it.’

Nel is quick to clarify that OSHbot is not a replacement for human beings – rather it is there to ‘augment [the] store associates.'”

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“Today, A Vision Has Gripped Him, And He Begins Scribbling Furiously On A Yellow Legal Pad With A No. 2 Pencil”

December 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Ralph H. Baer, who just passed away, began dreaming of designing games for TV sets in 1951, but it wasn’t until 15 years later that he started to fully flesh out the idea, eventually creating the first home video-game system, the Odyssey. From his New York Times obituary by Douglas Martin:

Flash back to the sultry late summer of 1966: Mr. Baer is sitting on a step outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan waiting for a colleague. By profession, he is an engineer overseeing 500 employees at a military contractor. Today, a vision has gripped him, and he begins scribbling furiously on a yellow legal pad with a No. 2 pencil.

The result was a detailed four-page outline for a “game box” that would allow people to play board, action, sports and other games on almost any American television set. An intrigued boss gave him $2,000 for research and $500 for materials and assigned two men to work with him. For all three, as they plowed through prototype after prototype in a secret workshop, the project became an obsession.

In March 1971, Mr. Baer and his employer, Sanders Associates in Nashua, N.H., filed for the first video game patent, which was granted in April 1973 as Patent No. 3,728,480. It made an extraordinarily large claim to a legal monopoly for any product that included a domestic television with circuits capable of producing and controlling dots on a screen.

Sanders Associates licensed its system to Magnavox, which began selling it as Odyssey in the summer of 1972 as the first home video game console. It sold 130,000 units the first year.

Odyssey consisted of a master control unit containing all the electronic gear, two player control units that directed players on the TV screen, and a set of electronic program cards, each of which supported a different game. Plastic overlays that clung to the screen to supply color were included. To supplement the electronic action, a deck of playing cards, poker chips and a pair of dice were included.

But the guts of the device were what mattered: 40 transistors and 40 diodes. That hardware ran everything. Odyssey, often called the first home computing device, had no software.

Several months after Odyssey hit the market, Atari came out with the first arcade video game, Pong. Though Pong became better known than Odyssey and was in some ways more agile, Sanders and Magnavox immediately saw it as an infringement on their patent.•

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“Making High Earners Feel Better In Just About Every Part Of Their Lives Will Be A Major Source Of Job Growth In The Future”

December 8, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a piece at the Los Angeles Review of Books about Tyler Cowen’s Average Is Over, a meditation on meritocracy run amok, Guy Patrick Cunningham compares tomorrow’s potentially technologically divided society, a sci-fi-ish dystopia few people would find acceptable, to life in the Middle Ages. An excerpt:

“Though Cowen doesn’t see it, the future he lays out seems rife with obvious, intrinsic structural inequalities that will make it very hard for anyone born outside the elite to actually show enough ‘merit’ to rise into it. And when he breezily asserts, ‘The more that the high earners pull in, the more people will compete to serve them, sometimes for high wages, and sometimes for low wages,’ and that, ‘making high earners feel better in just about every part of their lives will be a major source of job growth in the future […] Better about the world. Better about themselves. Better about what they have achieved,’ it becomes hard not to see this as a new form of aristocracy — one where people born with certain advantages are able to leverage them even further than today’s wealthy. Certainly, a smart, capable aristocracy, one theoretically open to talented outsiders, but an aristocracy all the same.

Cowen is careful to note that this system ‘is not necessarily a good and just way for an economy to run,’ but he certainly sees it as a given. Interestingly, he is also keen to emphasize the autonomy of the individual in the hyper-meritocracy. This isn’t itself surprising. But Cowen’s efforts to square the system he anticipates with humanistic ideas about individual agency fall flat. When he defends the possibility of building third-world style slums in the United States, he insists, ‘No one is being forced to live in these places […] I might prefer to live there if my income was low enough.’ Cowen essentially defines choice down to the absence of force. But this is meaningless — after all, no one chooses to live in a slum, unless the alternative is homelessness. Choice only matters when there are real alternatives to pick from. When Cowen compares a hyper-meritocratic society to the Middle Ages, he does so merely to point out that it is possible for a deeply unequal society to remain stable over a long period of time. But the comparison brings to mind another thought instead — that the values that underlie hyper-meritocracy are as un-humanist as those of the Medieval period.”

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“It’s As Good Or Bad As The People Harnessing It As A Technology”

December 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Virtual Reality software developer Tony Parisi discusses at Medium how the technology–like all technologies–can be a tool or a weapon, depending on who’s wielding it. An excerpt:

“Question:

What does the future of VR look like?

Tony Parisi:

Maybe we can help visualize climate change and figure out what to do about it. We can certainly teach better. And if we can teach better, then we can understand better. If we can simulate better, maybe we can understand other cultures, get a better sense of history, all those things are possible and going to be made better with VR if done well. Then, we can really help the world.

But it’s not going to solve everything; all of the problems we have as a planet or society. Not everything will be better in VR. I believe VR is like any of these other technological innovations. I believe it’s value neutral — it’s as good or bad as the people harnessing it as a technology, communications, and storytelling platform — and can ultimately be used for good or ill. I think we’re going to see abuses of it, surely. I think we’re going to see over-exuberance with what it can do. But that will all be tempered over time, and eventually the laws of the market and consumer attention will just shake it out and we will see VR wins in certain segments — for example, housing and real estate, retail, and travel all have phenomenal potential in VR.”

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“The Lid Of Pandora’s Box Is Starting To Open”

December 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Computer pioneer Clive Sinclair has been predicting since the 1980s that self-designing intelligent machines will definitely be the doom of us, but he’s not letting it ruin his day. Che sera sera, you carbon-based beings. As you were. From Leo Kelion at the BBC:

“His ZX Spectrum computers were in large part responsible for creating a generation of programmers back in the 1980s, when the machines and their clones became best-sellers in the UK, Russia, and elsewhere.

At the time, he forecast that software run on silicon was destined to end ‘the long monopoly’ of carbon-based organisms being the most intelligent life on Earth.

So it seemed worth asking him what he made of Prof Stephen Hawking’s recent warning that artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.

‘Once you start to make machines that are rivalling and surpassing humans with intelligence it’s going to be very difficult for us to survive – I agree with him entirely,’ Sir Clive remarks.

‘I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing. It’s just an inevitability.’

So, should the human race start taking precautions?

‘I don’t think there’s much they can do,’ he responds. ‘But it’s not imminent and I can’t go round worrying about it.’

It marks a somewhat more relaxed view than his 1984 prediction that it would be ‘decades, not centuries’ in which computers ‘capable of their own design’ would rise.

‘In principle, it could be stopped,’ he warned at the time. ‘There will be those who try, but it will happen nonetheless. The lid of Pandora’s box is starting to open.'”

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“We Don’t Have Much Time—That’s How I See It”

December 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

The opening question from an Economist interview with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a man in a hurry trying to manage the challenging future of a graying nation:

“The Economist:

Recently you seem to have been a whirlwind of activity. You’ve done a lightning tour of the Asia-Pacific region, three major summits in three different cities. You broke the ice with President Xi Jinping in Beijing, and in Brisbane you had a trilateral meeting with the leaders of Australia and the United States. No sooner were you back than you declared the date for a snap election and you dissolved the Diet. It seems, and this has often struck us at The Economist, that you think of yourself as a man in a hurry, a man with a mission.

Shinzo Abe:

We don’t have much time—that’s how I see it. The world is moving fast, in the context of a globalised economy. In East Asia, China is indeed rising, and many other countries around the world are trying to up their competitiveness.

In that context, two years ago Japan’s competitive position looked lost. Japan was about to fall off the world stage. Fertility rates are falling, and our population is ageing. We’re now seeing the absolute level of our population actually shrinking. That’s a very big challenge, and meanwhile Japan is confronted with a huge national debt. As I see it, Japan had to catch up, moving at the speed of the world, which is to say, very fast. And so we needed to speed up our reform of Japan as well.

Now, the 21st century is the one in which Japan really must regain economic strength as well as competitiveness. We are a democratic country, we feel that we cherish the value of freedoms and the rule of law and so forth. And as a democratic country—and as a pacifist nation—we really would like to make a contribution to the region as well as the rest of the world. This is something that I really want to say as a clear message to the rest of the world. This is the firm determination I have, and I am going ahead with reforms, sometimes in the face of severe opposition, but I am determined to do it. In order to do it more resolutely, I decided to dissolve the lower house of the Diet so that we can have strength in holding a solid majority.”

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“They Are Not Yet Innovative Enough To Send Us Many Fantastic New Products”

December 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a post for the “Upshot” section of the New York Times, economist Tyler Cowen suggests a variety of ways technology may begin to reverse the income inequality it has lately helped grow. Many of the ideas are modest and incremental, but there’s one giant one: The rising fortunes of emerging powers like China may eventually also help enrich Americans when such nations lose interest in making knockoff Apple products and create original companies as innovative as Apple. An excerpt:

“A final set of forces to reverse growing inequality stem from the emerging economies, most of all China. Perhaps we are living in a temporary intermediate period when America and many other developed nations bear a lot of the costs of Chinese economic development without yet getting many of the potential benefits. For instance, China and other emerging nations are already rich enough to bid up commodity prices and large enough to drive down the wages of a lot of American middle-class workers, especially in manufacturing. Yet while these emerging economies are keeping down the costs of manufactured goods for American consumers, they are not yet innovative enough to send us many fantastic new products, the way that the United States sends a stream of new products to British or French consumers, to their benefit. 

That state of affairs will probably end. Over the next few decades, we can expect China, India and other emerging nations to supply more innovations to the global economy, including to the United States. This shouldn’t be a cause for alarm. It will lead to many good things.

Since the emerging economies are relatively poor, many of these innovations may benefit relatively low-income Americans.”

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“I Guess There’s Some Residual Regret On Everyone’s Part”

December 7, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

In posting a piece of Norman Mailer’s 1956 letter to the Democrats, urging party members to draft Ernest Hemingway for their Presidential ticket, I made passing reference to Jack Henry Abbott, the longtime convict and fledgling writer Mailer helped spring in 1981 to disastrous results. Abbott later died in prison, a suicide, in 2002. From his Los Angeles Times obituary, penned by Myrna Oliver:

In 1977, when Abbott learned that Mailer was writing the book The Executioner’s Song about death row inmate Gary Gilmore, he wrote the author, offering to advise him on how imprisonment affects men.

Mailer, later calling Abbott’s letters “as good as any convict’s prose that I had read since Eldridge Cleaver,” maintained a prolific correspondence with the inmate from 1978 to 1981.

In 1980, he had excerpts printed in the New York Review of Books, prodding Random House to suggest the book, which was published in 1981.

Mailer further went to bat for Abbott with the parole board, and in June 1981 succeeded in getting him released to a halfway house in New York’s Bowery.

The author bought him a $500 suit and a pair of good shoes, hired him as his $150-a-week researcher and introduced him to other influential people, including the late author Jerzy Kosinski.

Abbott the jailhouse writer quickly became a celebrity, interviewed on Good Morning America and other programs and featured in People magazine.

Within six weeks of his release from prison, glowing in the attention from his just-published book, he went to New York’s Binibon 24-hour restaurant with a girl on each arm, and got into an argument with the actor-waiter Richard Adan over using an employees’ restroom. Taking the fight outside, Abbott stabbed the waiter to death and fled.

The Sunday New York Times had just hit the street with a review of In the Belly of the Beast, describing the book as “awesome, brilliant, perversely ingenuous; its impact is indelible, and as an articulation of penal nightmare it is completely compelling.”

The fugitive Abbott was captured two months after the stabbing, convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 15 years to life. He was next due for a parole hearing in June 2003.

His book was adapted into an edgy play of the same title first by Adrian Hall at Trinity Square Playhouse in Rhode Island and then re-adapted by director Robert Woodruff for the Taper Forum in 1984. The Los Angeles production was based not only on Abbott’s letters but on transcripts from his manslaughter trial.

One Times reviewer, when the play opened, wrote: ‘The dramatization is a gut-wrenching indictment of far more than our penal system….It gives us Abbott, unadorned, in his own words, which is enough. He’s a devilishly articulate analyst of the system that has him by the throat. His perceptions are both astonishing and on the mark.’

In 1990, after a bizarre civil trial in which Abbott represented himself, a jury awarded Adan’s widow more than $7.5 million in damages for the wrongful death.

“I’ve become a writer,” Abbott told jurors during the 1990 civil trial, inquiring of each if he had read his book. “As good as any other writer in this country, or even in Europe. This was something told to me, and I was encouraged to write. It was told to me by some of the top publishers and editors in this country.”

But those once-fawning supporters changed their minds after Abbott stabbed a man, abusing the freedom they had helped him win. Mailer’s friend Scott Meredith said, “Norman and I are stunned and distressed. I guess there’s some residual regret on everyone’s part.”

Kosinski was so remorseful that many said the episode contributed to his subsequent suicide. “Both Mailer and I believe in the purgatory power of art,” he mourned. “We pretended he [Abbott] had always been a writer. It was a fraud. It was like the ’60s, when we embraced the Black Panthers in that moment of radical chic without understanding their experience.

“I blame myself again for becoming part of radical chic,” he said. “I went to welcome a writer, to celebrate his intellectual birth. But I should have been welcoming a just-freed prisoner, a man from another planet.”•

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“Musk’s So-Called Gigafactory May Soon Become An Existential Threat To The 100-Year-Old Utility Business Model”

December 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Batteries, based on chemical reactions, are immune to Moore’s Law, but there’s certainly room for great improvement, and Elon Musk is going all in on the devices as a way to make EVs more affordable. If he’s successful with his Gigafactory, the ramifications will go far beyond cars. Tesla batteries are already being repurposed by homeowners who’ve converted to solar, and we’re just at the beginning. From Mark Chediak at Bloomberg:

“Here’s why something as basic as a battery both thrills and terrifies the U.S. utility industry.

At a sagebrush-strewn industrial park outside of Reno, Nevada, bulldozers are clearing dirt for Tesla Motors Inc.’s battery factory, projected to be the world’s largest.

Tesla’s founder, Elon Musk, sees the $5 billion facility as a key step toward making electric cars more affordable, while ending reliance on oil and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. At first blush, the push toward more electric cars looks to be positive for utilities struggling with stagnant sales from energy conservation and slow economic growth.

Yet Musk’s so-called gigafactory may soon become an existential threat to the 100-year-old utility business model. The facility will also churn out stationary battery packs that can be paired with rooftop solar panels to store power. Already, a second company led by Musk, SolarCity Corp., is packaging solar panels and batteries to power California homes and companies including Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

‘The mortal threat that ever cheaper on-site renewables pose’ comes from systems that include storage, said Amory Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a Snowmass, Colorado-based energy consultant. ‘That is an unregulated product you can buy at Home Depot that leaves the old business model with no place to hide.'”

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“It May Do Something More Useful, And That Is To Provide A Convincing Model Of How Such Reporting Can Be Paid For”

December 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

I have misgivings about the podcast phenomenon Serial, and how can you not? It’s something of an aural In Cold Blood of our times, and it shares many of the same moral quandaries, using a real-life horror to build suspense and entertain. All I could do was cringe when reporter Sarah Koenig told convicted killer Adnan Syed that he seemed like a good guy and that she enjoyed talking to him. It took the man behind bars to point out to her how asinine a statement that was, that it had nothing to do with his guilt or innocence. But as Truman Capote’s book overcame queasiness (at least for me) with sheer narrative greatness, Serial earns its keep with its look inside the deeply flawed worlds of law and order (and journalism).

Another ramification of the show is economics. In a Financial Times piece, Sarah Gordon and Shannon Bond argue that the popular podcast may have pointed the way forward for journalists seeking new revenue streams in our disrupted age. I doubt that, unless every story is going to have soap-ready elements and attractive “characters” and be presented like a crime drama. There will be a second season of Serial, but it’s difficult to imagine a single one about the impact of gerrymandering, for instance. From Gordon and Bond:

“While Serial may not represent a real departure from storytelling and reporting through the ages, it may do something more useful, and that is to provide a convincing model of how such reporting can be paid for. According to Edison Research, about 39m Americans, 15 per cent of the over-12 population, listened to a podcast last month, up from 12 per cent in 2013 and 9 per cent in 2008. Making money from them has, however, proved tantalisingly difficult. Paying per episode has not taken off, and providing potential advertisers with predicted audience size has been a very inexact science.

But as Serial has taken off, it has captured the attention of advertisers. Sponsored from the outset by email marketing provider MailChimp, it is now also supported by website publisher Squarespace, Amazon’s audio publishing arm Audible and NYT Now. These companies, themselves products of the digital revolution, see new opportunities in the close connection that forms between listeners and the voices in their ears.

‘We’re seeing brands get very interested [in podcasts] because they see it as a way to have an intimate connection with listeners,’ says Matt Lieber, co-founder of Gimlet Media, a new Brooklyn-based podcasting venture.

According to its chief executive Adam Sachs, Midroll, a podcast advertising company that places commercials in more than 150 shows, charges rates of between $20 and $30 per thousand impressions (calculated on a projected number of downloads per episode) — about five times the cost for traditional radio advertising. MailChimp says it paid in the range of $25-to $40 per thousand impressions for Serial. With downloads far exceeding the producers’ initial estimates, MailChimp ‘is getting a very good deal,’ says Emily Condon.

MailChimp has benefited not just from its paid advertising but from the social media conversation. Even a mangled pronunciation of MailChimp from the company’s in-show ad has received more than 3,100 mentions (#MailKimp) on social media, according to Brandwatch. The company says it does not measure sign-ups resulting from podcast advertising — and Audible also declined to discuss the impact of itsSerial ads — but Mark DiCristina, MailChimp’s marketing director, told Ad Week magazine that the company had seen a rise in sign-ups since the show started.

Originally funded chiefly by the popular US radio programme This American Life, Serial may not need many ‘sponsors’ (as podcast producers call their advertisers) for a second season.”

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“If The Higgs Goes, Everything Goes”

December 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

The most chilling words I heard all year were spoken by theoretical physicist David Kaplan near the conclusion of Mark A. Levinson’s documentary, Particle Fever, which focuses on the “awakening” and implementation of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN:

Super Symmetry could still be true, but it would have to be a very strange version of the theory. And if it’s the Multiverse, well, other universes would be amazing, of course, but it could also mean no other new particles discovered, and then a Higgs with a mass of 125 is right at a critical point for the fate of our universe. Without any other new particles, that Higgs is unstable, it’s temporary. Since the Higgs holds everything together, if the Higgs goes, everything goes. It’s amazing that the Higgs, the center of the standard model, the thing we’ve all been looking for, could also be the thing that destroys everything. The creator and the destroyer.

But, we could discover new particles and then none of that would be true.•

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“There Are A Lot Of Unanswered Questions That Americans Have, And Frankly I Have”

December 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Something significant happened between the mind-boggling grand jury decisions in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, and that was President Obama determining that police-officer body cameras needed to be dispersed across the country. After the brutal Garner homicide, which was captured fully on tape, brought back no indictment, there were pundits who said this was proof that Obama’s initiative wouldn’t help in any meaningful way.

Perhaps. But Eric Garner’s contorted face and cries for mercy are not going to go away thanks to that footage, and those images and sounds have convinced a large number of conservative politicians and editorialists to take an unusual stand, calling on Eric Holder and Congress to further investigate the murder of a victim who will remind us of injustice on an infinite loop. From Ed O’Keefe at the Washington Post:

“House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said Thursday that he still has ‘unanswered questions’ about the recent deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, two African Americans killed during confrontations with police officers.

‘Clearly both of these are serious tragedies that we’ve seen in our society,’ he said in response to a question at his weekly press conference. ‘I think the American people want to understand more of what the facts were. There are a lot of unanswered questions that Americans have, and frankly I have.’

Boehner said he wouldn’t rule out having House committees hold hearings into the matter. ‘I do think that the American people deserve more answers about what really happened here and was our system of justice handled properly,’ he said.

Boehner’s comments a few hours after Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), the fourth-ranking House Republican, said she ‘absolutely’ thinks the House should hold hearings into the matter.”

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